During the operation of tufting machines, a series of needles mounted along a reciprocating needle bar and carrying a series of yarns penetrate a backing material and are each engaged by corresponding hooks or loopers for forming cut and/or loop pile tufts of yarns in the backing material. Such engagement between the needles and hooks or loopers requires close precision in the positioning and operation of the needles and the hooks or loopers to ensure efficient and accurate operation of the tufting machine. During assembly of the tufting machines, it therefore is important that the needles, loopers, hooks, and/or other gauge parts be accurately mounted along their respective needle and/or hook or looper bars to ensure that such gauge elements or parts are accurately and consistently spaced and positioned along their needle and hook or looper bars. If the gauge parts are misaligned, the individual gauge elements can become broken or damaged, and tufts of yarns can be mis-sewn, resulting in inaccurate or irregular patterns being formed, which carpets generally have to be discarded.
Accordingly, it has been common practice to assemble and cast gauge parts such as needles, loopers, or hooks in modules, typically including five to ten, or more, individual gauge elements in precisely spaced series. These modules then can be mounted on a gauge bar to help ensure substantially consistent and accurate spacing of the gauge parts. One problem that arises, however, is that typically with such cast modules, especially where such modules are used in smaller gauge (i.e., 10 gauge or less) tufting machines, if a single gauge part such as a hook, looper or needle fails, (i.e., by becoming broken or dull), the whole module must be replaced. Such replacement of the modules is expensive and often can result in the additional removal and replacement of several undamaged or fully functional hooks or loopers within each of the modules, which leads to potential waste of other hooks/loopers in the module that are still operable. Additionally, even where the modules are made with replaceable gauge parts, such parts often can break off inside the module, making their replacement difficult and sometimes can still require replacement of the entire module
Accordingly, it can be seen that a need exists for a replaceable gauging element module that addresses the foregoing and other related and unrelated problems in the art.